"“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.”

I'm a compulsive completist and my film viewing centers quite a bit around watching entire filmographies of directors I'm interested in. I'm usually juggling 3-4 directors at a time so as to give myself some variety. I am hoping to maintain threads here wherein I'll post capsule reviews of the movies I watch and then hopefully rank the entire filmography.

I realize this sounds like a selfish thread but I'd love for all of you to participate with your views on the director as well as ranking the films you've watched by the director and anything else you think is relevant.

A rather melodramatic silent film that seems to have inspired what became a standard template for many a Bollywood production. The story itself is pretty straightforward. We follow the a poor orphaned servant girl who fortunes at any given time are entirely subservient to the whims of the upper class people who employ her. However, the film is raised well above the plot machinations by scenes that are just sublime in their beauty. I was also amazed by the pacing of the film. The film feels remarkably fast-paced even by modern standards and the climax is a perfect combination of nailbiting excitement as befits a chase scene with a great emotional payoff. Just lovely.

This one was really disappointing. It has none of the darkness and squalor of the book and feels really superficial. Plus, there are some really strange choices regarding which plot points to leave out. Catherine Hessling is really terrible. I was okay with her terrible acting in the beginning but as the film progresses and gets more dramatic, her performance really hurts the film. The saving grace of the film is Werner Krauss as Count Moffat. He totally embodies a character who is burdened by his sense of helplessness and defeat and manage to infuse the film with some much-needed emotion. He also has the best scene in the film where Nana has him behave like a dog. Given how experimental these early Renoir films feel, I was surprised that he didn't go further with the fever dream sequence at the end. Overall, this was the worst of the Renoir films I've watched so far.

This is a rather odd sci-fi short that feels really different from everything else I've watched by Renoir so far. In some kind of post-apocalyptic future, a blackfaced space explorer land in Paris and meets Catherine Hessling who keeps leering at him lasciviously and teaches him to dance. It feels mostly like a fun experiment for Renoir using special effects to make a drawing of a phone actually come to life, making a coat move and wrap itself around Hessling and so on. It's kind of fun.

I've always loved this little fairy tale. This short almost plays like two different films. The first half feels very realistic as it follows Catherine Hessling as the match girl peeking wistfully into restaurant windows dreaming about being in a warm space. But once she lies down in a snow trying to warm herself by lighting up her matches, it turns completely surreal. Suddenly, she's dreaming about being in a toy store where the toys come to life. This entire sequence feels like an animated film and is incredibly charming. But the sweetness of this sequence is soon followed by delirious fever dreams as the match girl falls victim to the harsh winter and starts to hallucinate about all the happiest memories she's had. The ending is particularly gorgeous and the short is really pretty great.

Laugh-out-loud funny combined with one of the most amazing tours of Paris. It'd be easy to dismiss this one as broad satire but Renoir brings such compassion to every single character and does such a great job of portraying class differences with humor and empathy that it rises well above all of that for me. Michael Simon is clearly having a ball and it's just a blast watching him play Boudu. Renoir had this to say about the film in his autobiography:

Quote:

Excuse me for talking about the technical end, but I wanted to take advantage of the fact that Michel Simon was so real, that he was a hobo among hoboes, he was all the hoboes in the world, and it was interesting to see whether all the hoboes in the world could be absorbed by the Parisian crowd. For this kind of shot, I obtained a very long lens, the kind of lens that is used in Africa to film lions from afar. But instead of filming a lion, I filmed Michel Simon. I stationed my camera in a second-floor window, so that I would be above the roofs of the cars going by, and my Michel Simon walked on the piers, through the streets of Paris, among people who didn’t notice him. And I shot many scenes like that.

You could have gone the Israfel route: keep your sex a mystery, forever, and indulge in a steady stream of pretty Monica Vitti pictures and widescreen avatars, this last quirk kicking off a fad that only das floyd still keeps humming.

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:42 pm

Beau

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

What is that, Trip? The next stage in meta-posting?

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:42 pm

Beau

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Beau wrote:

You could have gone the Israfel route: keep your sex a mystery, forever, and indulge in a steady stream of pretty Monica Vitti pictures and widescreen avatars, this last quirk kicking off a fad that only das floyd still keeps humming.

And Trip. And Brightside. But neither of them matter.

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:43 pm

Trip

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Beau wrote:

What is that, Trip? The next stage in meta-posting?

Says the guy who once posted a dozen quote boxes inside other quote boxes (there was text but I forget what), even in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Says the guy who once posted a dozen quote boxes inside other quote boxes (there was text but I forget what), even in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Oh, yeah. I was experimenting back then. The wild days of my youth.

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:45 pm

Trip

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

To be fair to me, and to demean das floyd, I've been consistently using wide avatars since the start of this forum, having had a problem with giant boxes that make posts unnecessarily large. He used circle avatars more than anything. Who let Beau speak of things about stuff?

To be fair to me, and to demean das floyd, I've been consistently using wide avatars since the start of this forum, having had a problem with giant boxes that make posts unnecessarily large. He used circle avatars more than anything. Who let Beau speak of things about stuff?

Yes, but notice how the foot of my giant box elegantly coincides with the end of the poem in my signature. I get excited just staring at the precision.

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:50 pm

Beau

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Except the precision in question entirely depends on how long the text of my response is, which is never uniform. Okay. Anyways, so, Renoir. The guy who did Rules. Let's keep this show going!

Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:52 pm

Trip

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Beau wrote:

Yes, but notice how the foot of my giant box elegantly coincides with the end of the poem in my signature. I get excited just staring at the precision.

At no point does it ever do this. The poem extends beyond the foot of your giant box almost every time. You use some sort of text zoom browser feature, I recall.

To be fair to me, and to demean das floyd, I've been consistently using wide avatars since the start of this forum, having had a problem with giant boxes that make posts unnecessarily large. He used circle avatars more than anything. Who let Beau speak of things about stuff?

I wouldn't say I'm a Renoir fan, but I'll keep an eye out for something interesting since it has been awhile.

Thu Jun 09, 2011 2:45 pm

Ekinflog

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Sweet thread

I have only seen a couple of Renoir's films, so I won't be able to comment much, but I will be reading.

Fri Jun 10, 2011 12:06 am

dreiser

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Beau wrote:

You could have gone the Israfel route: keep your sex a mystery, forever, and indulge in a steady stream of pretty Monica Vitti pictures and widescreen avatars, this last quirk kicking off a fad that only das floyd still keeps humming.

Hilarious.

_________________"I hate the dark, the sharks liars. And the stems of cherry..."

I've never seen a Renoir film and I'm a compulsive non-completist, so this is like entering another world where nothing makes sense. But I ain't so dense as to fail to notice that it's a new thread, a worthwhile new thread in fact, and I'm aware that you cannot be a reputable poster until you've made a worthwhile thread. Right, Jedi?

Fri Jun 10, 2011 2:34 am

Blevo

Re: Charulata's Director Marathon 1: Jean Renoir

Circus Freak wrote:

I've never seen a Renoir film and I'm a compulsive non-completist, so this is like entering another world where nothing makes sense. But I ain't so dense as to fail to notice that it's a new thread, a worthwhile new thread in fact, and I'm aware that you cannot be a reputable poster until you've made a worthwhile thread. Right, Jedi?

I've never seen a Renoir film and I'm a compulsive non-completist, so this is like entering another world where nothing makes sense. But I ain't so dense as to fail to notice that it's a new thread, a worthwhile new thread in fact, and I'm aware that you cannot be a reputable poster until you've made a worthwhile thread. Right, Jedi?

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